Mappa Mundi (55 page)

“And you've tinkered with this so that it won't cause a mass panic?” Kropotkin asked, acidic, but not entirely unimpressed.

“It comes with comfortable acceptance as standard,” she said dryly, knowing how much she sounded like a cheap ad for cars. “Nobody is going to start a revolution. Nobody is going to go bananas and start cutting people's heads off.”

She was interrupted by Jude starting another violent outburst of coughing that could have been laughing. The spasms were so violent that they would have thrown him out of a less stable seat. He held the wad of tissue that he'd been using for a while to his mouth and they all saw a sudden bright scarlet tint appear on it. He groaned as the coughing bout finally came to an end.

“What about the people who aren't infected, but know it's out there? How will you stop them?” he managed to whisper.

Natalie watched him with growing concern. The disease wasn't as bad as it looked—that would come when it opened its millions of tiny flowerets and released the Marburg virus. His question was a good one and she didn't know the answer.

“Jude,” she said. “I'm going to leave soon. When I do, you should go out first and stall for time. Any lead I can get will be important. Then Guskov can go, and then the people left here can make excuses for me until it's obviously too late.”

“We should all go out together,” Jude said, with an effort. “Guskov
in the front, but together. Otherwise they'll probably kill whoever is left in here. They won't wait if they think you've destroyed the information. They'll just come in shooting and ask later.”

Alicia Khan spoke holding her arm where they'd taken a sample of blood as though it hurt. “I can't believe you're going to try this. What if it all goes wrong? The risk calculations are astronomically high. There are too many unknowable factors.”

“In which case risk calculations are impossible,” Natalie agreed. “Give us another choice that isn't like that and we'll take it.”

“In the nineteen eighties everyone was convinced there was going to be nuclear war,” Khan replied. “But it never happened. The strategic defence initiatives and the Cold War situation worked out. Nobody fired. Didn't you consider that this might be a technology situation like that one? Everyone has it, but nobody uses it? You sending this out there, untested, unverified—it's like Hiroshima. You don't know what it's going to do.”

“They're already using it,” Jude said from the floor. “Just like Hiroshima. It's already out there. I've seen it.”

“I think we hardly need point out which nation was the only one to use a nuclear warhead aggressively,” Guskov added, staring with the tight lips of contempt at Alicia and her second-rate head. “You have a history of shooting first against enemies with lesser power.”

She rolled her eyes at this, thinking it a cheap shot worthy only of the standard response. “It ended the war.”

“Yes,” he said. “And that's not all it ended. It started this age, in which the deepest pocket and the smartest minds get to hold the guns against which there's no resistance.”

“If Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been left alone, do you think that someone else wouldn't have used a nuclear device in a later conflict?” she retorted. “It would be the same, whoever used it.”

“But if the USA had used it as a threat, instead of a reality, what then?”

“Ah, God, does the argument never get any further than this?” Kropotkin demanded, eyes watering as much with frustration as with the symptoms of the Deliverance.

“It's time,” Natalie said quietly. She hated the idea as much as any of them but the bickering was starting to eat away at her determination with its constant circuits of hopeless emotional resistance. She felt the revulsion as much as any of them—hell, more so—she was well in its grip now and the sensations weren't the distant wallowings they'd been in the early days. Now she saw. Now she saw it all like Bobby had promised and it was terrible.

“Jude.” She nudged him with her foot. “Get up. Let's go.” She looked down at his wretched face, eyes bloodshot and surprised at her callousness, but he got up. Maybe he was able to see what she intended to do. Maybe not. She didn't care any more. The weight of so much responsibility made her unwilling to start sharing her troubles out for discussion. She knew there was only one way she had a hope of saving Jude. Mary Delaney wasn't about to deal him in on any late plea bargains—so she was going to take it.

Moving made him cough and behind her, even as she started sneezing in a string of belters that felt they were about to blow her face off, she heard the room's fragile peace explode with wet misery. She started to turn towards him as they cleared the door…

…And as she turned she looked inside and saw the fat, clear shapes of the Deliverance capsules dancing amid her own cells—easy to see, because they were the only ones that didn't talk to her, just sat there sending her T-cell response into a frenzy, raking up her hormones, guzzling her blood nutrients as if it was some goddamned all-you-can-eat happy hour. She saw how they held together and how she was held together and that there was a sameness there. She separated her information from theirs and she tore them apart…

…And as she finished turning, admiring the beautiful rainbow of colour particles inside the paintwork that managed to be such a dull
beige to the ordinary eye, she said, “Listen to me. From now on you have about fifty minutes before this stuff can save you, if it can work a conversion like it did to me. I know what you're thinking.” She put her hands out to his arms to stop his protest and locked eyes with him until he accepted what she saw brewing up in the dark storm inside his head. “And I want you to stall her better than that. Live for fifty minutes. Got that?”

His streaming eyes looked into hers with difficulty and narrowed as he tried to figure out what she was about. But like the rest of the world, there was no choice in the matter for Natalie. She knew how Bobby had done his undoing trick, the Indian rope job that let information pass freely between molecular organizations, in the single-electron fields. She didn't hesitate—she walked right through Jude and on her way she prayed that it worked, praying to any god, just in case, thinking, “This is what they used to call the Dance of Shiva, creation in its evolving form. It
is
like a dance. But not so much fun.”

In transit she realized why it was that Ian Detteridge had followed her to help out; information is a state of energy and on the pass-through there were split moments where that energy belonging to Jude became hers and she was Jude Westhorpe. It was clearer from this side.

She turned around. Jude's back was to her. He was frozen to the spot in shock. She knew the feeling. She knew. There was no secret heart at the bottom of the world waiting to leap out and bite. There was nothing except minds and silence. But what could she possibly say to him to stop his headlong rush to that silence? What could make any difference at all?

Slowly he turned to face her. “Did it take?”

“Yes.” She didn't need scanners now. She could see the decay in his right molar, the blood in his heart, the cringing lining of his guts that were suffering the anxiety and the fear. She could see, whether she wanted to or not. In a couple of years that stomach would turn ulcerous, and given a bit more stress the virus sitting in the nerve
junctions of his face would leap out into cold sores that wouldn't subside without a truckload of acyclovir. She could see parts of him dying right there, breaking down and collapsing, bursting and exploding and dispersing into taints in the plasma. On his skin legions of flora and fauna were blissfully ignorant of the host state. On her skin no intruders existed. She'd lost them when she'd dispersed herself, and the same went for all her internal microbes that hadn't been opted-in by NervePath.
Remember that when you sell this system
, she mentally noted,
there has to be a way of reinstalling them
…

Jude was talking.

“Will you be back?”

She smiled. “I don't know. I'll try.” She touched his arm, carefully, as though there was no intimacy between them, and saw him flinch. “I'm sorry.”

He hesitated and she knew why—he thought that he'd remembered something. But for him the memory was impossible and his mind discounted it. “Sorry for what?”

“Never mind.” She stood up on tiptoe and kissed him. “Goodbye, Jude.”

He didn't say anything, but made a small nod of his head, fighting the urge to cough.

“You look better,” he said, a kind of parting shot, trying to be up.

“Fifty minutes,” she said, pointing her finger at him.

He nodded again, although she knew that he was thinking,
No chance of that. I'm sorry, too, but not this time.

And she couldn't blame him, not for a second.

“Natalie?” It was her father, standing in the open doorway. She knew he suspected, although he hadn't seen what she'd done.

“Dad.” She stepped across the huge, tiny space between them and held him tight. “I'm going.”

“Be careful,” he said, knowing it was pathetic, an offering of sound, nothing you could take with you.

“Always.” And she closed her hand into a fist up in front of his face, taking hold of those words and then pressing her hand against her heart, to take them with her.

She turned away from them both and walked the length of the narrow corridor. At its end it was almost impossible not to spin around but she didn't do it. She turned right, towards the exit, but long before she got to it she was unpicking the information, letting the spaces open, travelling faster than she ever had before to her distant destination and as she travelled she lost information steadily, like tears falling into the gaps that lay, vast and empty, between one form of energy and another.

Jude watched Natalie go through a hazy world of pain as he had to start the endless bloody rounds of coughing one more time, but his thoughts that followed her were full of admiration for the strong way she set her back, head high on that small body. It was a suicide mission and she went straight to it, no last glances backwards as he was doing, mentally, all the time, into his memories of his own life.

He was vaguely aware of her father, upright but with the off-balance stance of a clockwork machine, stalled with a sudden failure of power.

When his coughing at last fell quieter, he panted out, “We should act now. While I can still talk.”

Calum Armstrong looked at him as though only noticing his presence for the first time. “Yes,” he said tonelessly, his face flat, expressionless. He went back inside the room. Jude stayed where he was. He didn't hear the elevator doors. He wondered briefly if Natalie might be there, around the corner, waiting, thinking, frightened, but his heart told him no, she'd gone; there was a flatness and a smallness in him that was like a kind of shutdown. Those areas of himself that had been optimistic and future-oriented were closed, their doors locked and the keys swallowed up in an ocean of grey tides whose waves were each as blank and identical as the last.

Jude thought of his life, and he wanted most of all to have it make
sense to him, like a well-told story. Up to this point it seemed to lack plot and now, in its final hours, that distressed him, as Natalie had said it would, like there were too many things left undone and unthought-of. White Horse was beyond redemption. His father, too, was a footnote, a mystery, a clue pushed to one side for an eternal late-date with history that was never to come. His mother—she at least he had no unfinished deals with. How would she find out what had happened to him? Would the government send someone, or would he be a casualty in the papers? What story would Mary concoct? Maybe she would be the one to take her grey sedan up to Seattle, knock on the house door, and in her black suit say, “Ms. Westhorpe, we're so sorry…” But no. That at least he intended to conclude in a manner that he could die with. The misery of the symptoms in his head and body were nothing against this resolve. He would have it out with her. She was the pivot of the one strand he was still able to control.

It occurred to him that he was being stupid and melodramatic, but then, he hadn't expected a dramatic end and if that was what he was going to get, he wasn't going to waste it. For a second Natalie's promise of fifty minutes roamed around in his mind, looking for a home, but even if it held true he didn't think he'd last much longer, Marburg or no Marburg. It was a valiant effort, a two-fingered gesture in the face of fate, but it was only a gesture and its effects would be as permanent as a flick of fingers and the fall of a hand.

Guskov surrendered first.

Jude waited for him to clear the highside exit, counted the minutes as prescribed in the letter of Mary's demands, listened to the coughing, the sneezing, and the new and despairing silence of the science team as they waited their turn. Instead of Natalie emerging alone, they all went together. Jude stood at the front to lead them out and through watering eyes saw the lines of soldiers in full biogear, guns ready, who flanked each side of the elevator doors. He had no time to waste on them however, because Mary herself was standing in the sunlight
of the driveway; he recognized her slimmer figure with the suit's green waistband cinched in tight, and through the polished faceplate of clear glass he could see the stark whiteness of her skin, touched into shadows about the eyes and mouth so that it seemed like her skull alone was looking for him.

The soldiers didn't move a muscle at the change of plans, but after a moment of indecision she stalked forward to meet him. There was no sign of Guskov, although there looked to be movement in the laboratory trucks parked up alongside the house, their paintwork now stuck with a few yellow leaves, the first of fall.

Jude made himself stand straight, his chest and throat feeling as though red-hot pokers had been reaming them out. He looked through the reflections of the trees and sky on her glass and into her blue eyes, still pretty, despite what lay beneath. The moment seemed to last a long time to him. He could smell the damp earth and feel the warmth of the falling sun, in each the promise of a night of rain, the growth of fungi, the fall of leaves, the beginning of rot and suppuration. In her face he saw her twisted emotions, lying far below the surface, like looking through a pool of deep water into the muddy bottom and seeing an ancient fish stir its fins. She looked on him with love, but one so long suppressed it had mutated into a form of possession.

He tried to erase the thought—he didn't want to pity her—but it was long in going.

“Where is she?” Mary asked, glancing past him with revulsion to the rest, who had been left to stand weakly sneezing and snivelling in a group on their own, like the cattle at Dugway, no help moving in for them until she said so.

“You mean Natalie Armstrong?” He was going to have to do better than that. He made himself duck his head and hesitate. “They thought she might go the same way as that other patient, X…” He made an expression that said it was something so awful to witness that he was finding it impossible to tell her.

“Is she still in the Environment?” Mary's voice through the filters was muffled into a soft sound he knew she wasn't feeling. Her body was knotted with tensions, rigid in its flat face-forward stance. He glanced again at her, daring her not to feel sorry for his wretched state.

“It's hard to say. We lost contact with her.”

How long had it been? Thirty minutes? He wasn't sure, but his mind felt it was about twenty. Twenty to go. He hadn't got that long. Abruptly he realized his symptoms had got no worse. The histamine peak must be close.

“Jude. Where is Armstrong?”

“I don't know. I think she's dead.” Which was the truth. Through the glass he saw Mary's face change. It said,
Why are you making this hard for both of us?

He said, “It's hard because you made it that way when you decided to play me for an idiot. You got me. For a long time, you got me. Man, I must be the slowest guy you've ever come across. I'll bet you could hardly keep your pants dry you were laughing so hard—Guskov your pet study and me there rolling right along thinking
Hot damn! We're such unlucky people when it comes to getting the evidence.
So don't look at me like you deserve anything but the hard way.”

Her mouth dropped open slightly and for once the comeback was slow to arrive. “Jude,” she said. “What's wrong with you?”

He started laughing. He couldn't help it. He knew what she meant, but he couldn't stop it anyway and it made him start coughing and sneezing all over again and the spasms were so bad he ended up on his knees, doubled over and bright red all over his trousers and little dark clots of blood like jellies landing on the wind-stirred dust of the ground.

He saw one of the anonymous men in warfare gear come up to Mary with a scanner and take some readings from him. He saw her consult with him over headmikes and he saw, as the man came around for a second pass, the gun on his shoulder that was hanging close there.
He saw inside the man's mind a flurry of worries about the readings he was seeing and an anxiety about Jude that was fully justified.

Give me the gun
, Jude insisted.
Hand it over like there was nothing wrong in it. Easy does it.

Mary was turning to talk to a corporal who had arrived and was asking questions about how to deal with the infected cases, what to do about the infected Environment. Was she sure that the payload wasn't out yet. Was she ready to sign off the MUV shots…

Jude gratefully took hold of the heavy weapon as he was handed it, able to take off the safety, brace it, and set on the trigger with a dexterity he'd never had before. As he came up to standing straight the scan-man leapt away from him, only then realizing what he'd done. At the same moment the corporal reached for his own weapon and ten of the thirty armed soldiers who'd been watching the emerging scientists in horrified fascination turned around and focused their anxiety on him.

Mary turned.

“Jude!” She was surprised, really. She started to smile. “Don't be silly. Look around you. This isn't gonna work.”

“Yeah, I see that.” He straightened up to his full height and the gun felt good in his arms.

“For God's sake! Put it down. Don't make this worse. Don't you get it? It was never about you and me. It was security. It wasn't personal.”

He'd heard her say that before. “You're wrong. It's always personal to the one on the receiving end.”

There was such a fight going on inside her, between impulses that could none of them be satisfied. She wanted power, but to be liked. She wanted control, but not to take the blame. She wanted him to give in and a part of her wanted him to go ahead and finish it there because going on was harder, longer, and, ultimately, led nowhere she wasn't already at.

Jude made her decision for her. It was easy really. He only had to think of the fire smell of his sister's burned hair, the shiny, red skin, and the last note she wrote, trusting Mary as his well-known friend.

With the sensation of a sharp object being tugged out of his breastbone he took in a long breath and knew that he was free.

Selfware, it made you more yourself than you ever were. That was for sure. For the first time in his life he was certain that he was doing the right thing, the only thing, the justified thing. As he squeezed the trigger closed the peace inside him was indescribable in its relief.

Mary was flung ten feet by the shot as it punctured the suit and exploded inside her.

Jude watched her falling. The return of fire hit him ten times harder. The blows moved in him like a frenzy and he knew he was dead before his face hit the ground. It didn't matter, though. He was done here. He'd found the closing line, and he'd said it, and it was time to go before things fell apart in any one of a hundred anticlimactic ways. There wasn't even going to be time to say goodbye to anything of his world, but he watched it unfurling gently, like a long banner, streaming away from him into the forever lost spaces of the darkening, blue twilight as he fell. It didn't hurt and he was glad about that. It was like starting to dream and then sliding to a deeper place.

Natalie worked fast, not even pausing to talk with the people she'd met once they'd shown her their workstations. She installed the systems with a slam of disk into loader, a few keystrokes and then she left for the next destination. Five passed. Five, and four at least were full of people wanting to figure out how they could take a few percent off the top of the price and how to fiddle the system and how to use the stuff to make themselves more capable of shafting the next guy up the line, but that was okay, because she didn't want the responsibility of screwing everyone up all by herself and a few more Ray Innises would help the medicine of bitter knowledge go down better. She had hopes about No Fear and Prefer Compromise, but she hadn't got any hopes that the basic nature of the animal was going to change. When money grew on trees and everyone was in harmony, then she'd believe happiness
was something you could design and sell. For now this would have to do, and whether it was the start of a new era or the death fits of the old one, she'd maybe never know.

Each time she travelled she bled information.

On destination seven the disks themselves she was carrying had become corrupt and the journey was at its end. Natalie looked at the wrecked object in her hand, perfect except for the fatal exceptions deep in its structure that had destroyed the program it had carried so far. She was like that, too, she knew it but, as Ian must have done, although she knew she'd lost she didn't know
what
she'd lost and so it wasn't that bad, not like being normal and realizing the magnitude of something gone.

She sat on a stone wall outside a terrace plantation on the subcontinent, tea bushes growing calmly around her in the velvety darkness. Behind her the packing factory and its secret heart of NP production machinery ground quietly into action for a long night's work. The scent of jasmine was heady and the sun gone ten minutes. The blue light reminded her of a long ago day, running through a wood and then, just as she felt an important thing was about to be revealed, the memory died.

She got up and walked a short way between the bushes, the stars overhead so bright, so distant. She watched one blueshifting away, another redshifting in. She still had one task to go. Was it true that time could be backtraced without unstitching her? She doubted that. How could you go back in time but retain your conscious states of memory? They relied on entropy and change in a linear timeline to exist. But the file remained a mystery—otherwise how had Jude got it? And there was that second in the laboratory where Ian had hinted to her that there might be a way back for him, a glimpse into the past when he was still a man with a family—he'd thought maybe he could relearn who he'd been, put himself together again. It was that theory she'd used when she'd tried to retain a copy of Jude in the crossover.
But if she was shot full of holes now then he would be, too, his data as useless as the disks themselves.